Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 14, 2011 @06:30PM
from the for-your-own-safety dept.

Trailrunner7 writes with this news from ThreatPost: "A targeted attack on a defense contractor in March of this year resulted in the theft of 24,000 files by an unknown attacker, according to Defense Department officials. The attack, which officials say was the work of a foreign government, would represent one of the more serious known attacks on the department and its contractors. In a speech Thursday in which he unveiled the Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, William J. Lynn, deputy defense secretary, said that the attack was just one of thousands such intrusions that the government and its contractors suffer every year."

They were connected because the information on them is unclassified. Yeah, they might prefer that the files wouldn't be disclosed to attackers, but in the end, the information isn't super secret. The convenience of the internet (easy collaboration with other engineers around the country, being able to use people that don't have a security clearance, or saving on the cost of a separate computer network) outweighs the risk in this case.

Believe it or not, the most blindingly obvious step in securing classified data (putting it on a separate network that's unconnected to the internet, a concept that I came up with before I was 10 years old and I'm sure I wasn't the youngest) has already been taken. It's a good thing, too... computer security is hard, and you don't want to take that risk with anything that poses a threat to national security.